Robert G. Brown wrote:
>The sad truth is that cluster nodes have an ECONOMICALLY useful lifetime
>of somewhere between 18 months and 3 years, depending on lots of things,
>although one can arguably get work done out to 5 years on nodes that
>require no human time to run or repair that other people are paying to
>feed and cool.
>>>That makes a strong argument for considering energy consumption when
building a cluster in the first place. Lower energy consumption = Lower
energy cost, longer economically useful life = Lower TCO/year.
Same argument works for server blades, and I'm amazed that energy costs
don't come up as a consideration more often.
A researcher at LANL has built a cluster based on Transmeta chips called
Green Destiny, making the energy cost argument, which is documented in
http://public.lanl.gov/feng/Bladed-Beowulf.pdf
He claims a much lower TCO for his Transmeta-based system, but only a
small part of the claimed savings is electricity costs.
RM
RM